By Our Reporter
SHILLONG, Sep 20: Power Minister AT Mondal on Wednesday admitted in the Assembly that the state faced a very unprecedented load-shedding this year leading to the consumers going without electricity for hours.
Stating that the department was equally concerned, he said: “We faced a lot of problems as far as the power generation is concerned and it was very unfortunate that the monsoon was very delayed. Our situation became so bad that our generating units could not produce the average electricity.”
He said the general fell to 1.05 million units against the daily lean season requirement of 6.6 million units, underscoring the shortfall.
“We tried to get power from NEEPCO, NTPC, and NHPC with whom we have a power purchase agreement but the fact was even NEEPCO was facing problems as three of its power projects had to go for shutdown thereby reducing our entitlement to a huge extent,” Mondol said.
“Moreover, unit 3 of Myntdu Leshka suffered some glitches and generation was put on hold in June last year. The company undertaking the rectification of the fault said the work would be completed by August,” he said.
The repairing work has been completed and synchronisation has been done but some faults, requiring imported parts, have remained, the minister said.
He informed the House that the shutdown of two units of the Palatana gas-based plant in Tripura added to the power problem in the state. The state has been receiving a substantial volume of power from Palatana.
Earlier, Mondol replied to a cut motion jointly brought by VPP legislator Ardent M. Basaiawmoit to deliberate on the status of the MeECL and its subsidiaries – MePDCL, MePTCL, and MePGCL.
“Rs 22,27,22,721 is required to regularise the advance from the contingency fund as additional support to the MeECL for payment of outstanding electricity dues to various government departments till March 31. Hence, the supplementary demand to regularise the same,” the minister said.
“The clearance of the dues of the government departments is the pre-qualification criteria under the RDSS scheme. Hence, in order to streamline the process of clearance of dues of government departments, the power department has cleared the dues in a centralised manner by availing funds as advance from contingency funds. The amount is being regularised through supplementary demands,” he added.
Pointing out that the discussion conveyed some apprehension about possible duplicity of bills, Mondol said, “Bills already paid by the respective departments will be excluded from this grant.”
“This will be completely the outstanding bill which we need to provide to the department. This is being done in many other states to regularise and centralise so that the department need not wait for years for the payment to be cleared,” Mondol said.
He said Rs 3.36 crore is required as additional support to enable Meghalaya Non-Conventional & Rural Energy Development Agency (MNREDA) to pay salaries, wages and PPF contributions of the officers and the staff of the district officers during the financial year 2023-24.
He also said the total budget for the MNREDA is Rs 8.71 crore, of which Rs 5.35 crore has already been paid to the department.